Zhen Ma is currently an Assistant Professor in Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering in Syracuse University, entitled as Samuel and Carol Nappi Research Scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Clemson University in 2011 and pursued postdoctoral studies in University of California, Berkeley. His past research focused on multicellular patterning and micro-tissue construction for cardiovascular research. By combining human iPS cells and engineering methodologies to establish 3D human heart models, he was awarded as Siebel Postdoctoral Scholar and American Heart Association (AHA) Postdoctoral Fellow. His primary research interests are organ-on-chip systems, stem cell engineering and disease modeling.

Explosive progress in human induced stem cells (hiPSCs) has provided great opportunities for precision medicine and companion diagnostics on patient-derived cells with increasing ease. Our research integrates hiPSC biology, tissue engineering and gene editing technologies to lead the development of next generation hiPSC-based patient/disease-specific in vitro tissue models and organ-on-chip systems. These tissue models aim to accurately recapitulate the complexity of three-dimensional (3D) tissue architecture, the dynamics of in vivo-like biological response, and pathophysiological status of human tissue for better understanding human disease etiology and evaluating the efficacy of the personalized treatments to the individual patients. We have established the 3D mechanical-tunable cardiac model by populating synthetic organized filamentous matrices with wild-type and diseased cardiomyocytes derived from hiPSCs. This highly defined human 3D cardiac model will help us to better understand the disease mechanism and formulate better therapeutic strategies for this syndrome, moving drug discovery and development into the era of personalized medicine.